The Two Faces of Janus v. AFSCME
2018-07-06 · Guest: Jonathan Tasini (Progressive podcaster and editor) · 51:49
Janus v AFSCME and public sector unions
Bob Zadek and progressive podcaster Jonathan Tasini debate the implications of the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision. They explore the tension between compelled speech and the “free rider” problem, the historical role of unions in building the middle class, and the economic impact of public sector collective bargaining on government resource allocation.
Topics: Janus v. AFSCME, Public Sector Unions, Agency Fees, Compelled Speech, Collective Bargaining, Labor Economics, Middle Class, Teacher Uprisings, CEO Pay, Corporate Governance
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Jonathan Tasini: Progressive podcaster and publisher/editor of Working Life
Introduction to Janus v. AFSCME [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. Are we going to have an enjoyable and informative hour about to start? In the most recent term of the Supreme Court, the one that just ended, the Supreme Court handed down the much-awaited, the much-anticipated, and in many circles, much-feared decision. The caption of the case was Janus v. AFSCME.
The Janus case asked the Supreme Court to decide whether or not public sector unions—teachers, SEIU, and the like, the unions that represent workers in government employment as opposed to private—the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether a worker, a government worker, could be compelled to pay what is called agency fees or fair share fees. That is, a worker who didn’t want to join the union, whether they could be compelled to pay a portion of what otherwise would be union dues to support the union’s contract negotiations and contract enforcement efforts.
The issue was—the arguments in favor of compulsory payment of those dues, agency fees to the union—the argument was that if the worker was getting the benefits because if the union negotiated a contract, the higher salary, if it would be higher, would benefit both the non-payer as well as the payer, so-called “free rider” issues. And so therefore, the policy was workers should not be given a free ride, get the benefit of union negotiation without paying a dime but getting the benefits.
The other—the workers in the past argued, or some of them argued, that no, that’s not fair. We’re paying for the unions to promote political points of view we don’t agree with. The unions responded by saying, “No, you’re only paying a portion of the dues that we have allocated to contract negotiations. You’re not paying for what’s called compelled speech.” Well, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, Justice Alito writing for the majority and the usual players took sides—the more conservative justices supported Alito’s position and the more progressive or more progressive judges were in the dissent. That decision has caused quite a furor in the media. There’s been a lot of discussions.
This morning, I have invited Jonathan Tasini, who is a very outspoken critic of AFSCME. Jonathan has long been a strong supporter of workers’ rights and workers’ rights in the marketplace. He was a national surrogate for Bernie Sanders in the last presidential campaign. He appeared on CNN quite a bit. So, Jonathan and I will discuss the merits and the issues behind the Janus decision. We are not going to discuss all that much the Supreme Court, the legal precedent behind it, whether or not it was decided soundly on free speech grounds. It is more interesting, if you will, to discuss the issue on policy grounds. So, with that introduction, I’m delighted to welcome Jonathan to the show. Jonathan, good morning and welcome to our show this morning.
Jonathan Tasini: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
The Free Rider Problem [05:24]
Jonathan Tasini: Well, let me first add one other piece of background information, which is that there’s a sense sometimes that the plaintiffs like to give in these cases—and before Friedrichs, there were other cases—this has been percolating up for several years, that this is this grassroots uprising of individual workers who are opposed to the notion of unions having fair share fees. But really behind this is a well-funded campaign by, frankly, anti-union billionaire sons, the Scaife Foundation, lots of names that are familiar in the right-wing circles, people who funded Steve Bannon and a whole circle of those people funding these cases because of their animus toward unions, having nothing to do with the question of fairness or whether this is free speech or not. They are trying to destroy the labor movement. This is their mission. And you can see a great study that I talked about in one of my podcasts done by the Economic Policy Institute that lays out who is actually behind these series of cases.
Now, to your question. Look, in the law—and we’re not going to necessarily discuss the specifics about free speech—but unions are required under the law to do what’s known as Duty of Fair Representation, DFR. And if you ask any normal labor lawyer on the union side, what are the biggest number of cases they have, or one of the biggest number of cases that they have, they’re called Duty of Fair Representation cases. And what are those? A union member, someone who is—or actually someone who’s not a union member, someone who’s paid an agency fee—says the union didn’t represent me and I’m going to sue them because my grievance wasn’t handled well, right? And that means that anybody who’s under the union contract can take on those cases.
So on the one side, you have unions required to represent everybody, whether you’re a union member or not. And that costs a lot of money. And in America, I think we have a standard or a belief that you don’t get something for free. And if you want to join a club, a private club, or if you want to have a membership to something, you have to pay money for the service you get. And that was essentially inherent and goes back 40 years and longer, but certainly 40 years to a case known as Abood, which, as you and I agree, we don’t want to get down too much into the weeds, but it’s a long-standing precedent that simply says you have every right in the public sector not to belong to a union. You don’t have to be a union member. But you need to pay a fee to basically pay for the service that brings you the benefit of the collective bargaining. And that seemed to me to be the fairest approach and a reasonable logical one that the Supreme Court decided 40 years ago.
Political Allocation of Fees [08:31]
Jonathan Tasini: And then the last point I’ll say, they made very clear, and unions have to do this, they made very clear that none of that money could be used for political purposes. And unions are required, actually, to divide the costs. They spend lots of money in terms of their internal staffing and accounting to make sure that the money that’s paid in agency fees does not go to political operations.
Bob Zadek: Now, the Justice Alito in the decision in Janus spoke to the free rider issue. And he spent some time in the decision and he said the free rider issue can be dealt with in lots of other ways. And under strongly established constitutional law principles, when free speech rights are implicated in any way, the government has a huge burden to overcome to show that the infringement on free speech rights cannot be—that goal cannot be accomplished by any other means.
And the Supreme Court said, whether they were right or wrong, I have no idea. But they considered the issue and they said there are other ways for the union to be compensated to avoid the detriments of free rider. And as to the issue of the allocation, yes, of course, unions have spent a fair amount of money, as they are required to do, in order to allocate expenses between political activities and contract negotiation, contract administration. However, those calculations were looked upon, rightly or wrongly, with a fair amount of skepticism because there’s so much judgment involved. And obviously, it is human nature to imagine that if unions are making the calculation, to the extent there are a myriad of judgment calls, they will make the judgment call in favor of the union.
Therefore, the allocation was felt by the Supreme Court in Janus and by others in the labor-management world as being, well, somewhat suspect. So that’s the response to the issue of, well, you’re not paying for political activity, we do as best job as we can to allocate money. I mean, that’s like both sides of the issue. Now, Jonathan, you could say, well, the unions work very hard to try to do a good job, and I could be skeptical, and it has to sort of stop there. But that issue was at least discussed, whether reaching the right conclusion, it was considered in the Supreme Court decision, was it not?
Jonathan Tasini: Yes. And look, Justice Alito is probably one of the smartest justices on the conservative wing, if I could say that. But, and I say that smart in the sense that he is the most committed ideologue in that wing. And he has come up with a concoction in order to justify the overturning of a 40-year precedent. Do I think that every division of the cost of this was perfect? If every single dime go just to the collective bargaining? I’m not sure of that. But if you look at the—if you telescope back, there’s no question, and I know this internally from the unions that I’m familiar with, they spend an enormous amount of time doing that division.
The “Something for Free” Ethos [12:18]
Jonathan Tasini: I think the bigger question, if I could say that, or at least an important question is, do we think that it’s a decent notion that if I’m Joe Smith or Mark Janus, that if I’m getting the benefits of collective bargaining, that I should not be required to pay a fee? If I want to join my gym, you know, and again, this is a private arrangement, although it’s in the public sector, there’s an arrangement of collective bargaining. I get something in return. There seems to me that one of the basic principles in America that we sort of hold to is, look, Joe, you can’t get something for free. If you want to have a decent job, you have to get a degree or you have to have certain skills. You don’t just get something for free in this country. And that’s essentially what Alito has said, to make it in a gross way. We’re not going to require people to do this, to pay this fee. And I just think that it’s bizarre and it certainly contradicts 40 years of the way in which we went about things. And by the way, that precedent that was overturned was a unanimous decision 40 years ago by the Supreme Court. The left and the right, conservatives and liberals, when they weren’t ideologues, meaning when they didn’t have a political agenda, which Alito does—he has strong anti-union animus—back in that day, it was decided unanimously that yes, you could charge agency fees.
Public Sector Bargaining as Political Speech [13:51]
Bob Zadek: Now, as to the direct issue of getting something for nothing, because it’s an important point, you’ve mentioned it twice so far, and it certainly is—and I acknowledge that—the American ethos is you shouldn’t get something for nothing. You should pay your, to borrow a phrase, fair share of what you get. I agree with that. However, let’s take the issue of wages and benefits, compensation to employees. Now, that issue, when the union does its job and it does as aggressive a job as possible to negotiate the highest wages for public service workers, what it is doing is it is in effect effecting a political decision. Because to the extent that the employer, the state or local government employer, the school system, has to pay money to teachers in the contract, they don’t pay money for something else, like police protection or the roads or the sewers or whatever it is that municipalities and governments do.
So that’s a political decision itself. And therefore, it is possible that a worker, let’s say Mark Janus—I don’t know what he really believes, but let’s say Mark Janus—Mark Janus believes as a political matter that his community should allocate more money to police protection and less money to education. That’s what he believes as a political matter. That’s how he would vote with his ballot box. By being compelled to support a union which will negotiate for a bigger piece of the pie for workers, Mark Janus is supporting a political position that he doesn’t endorse. And does that in any way offend you? Because that is clearly compelled speech. He’s forcing a government to allocate money differently than he would otherwise like as a voter.
Jonathan Tasini: Well, you raise an interesting point. And the way I would say this is that Mark Janus, or let’s just take him aside because he was the direct plaintiff, but take anybody. They have—we wear different hats in life. And so as a citizen, I would have the right to go vote for Bob as my legislator or my governor because he or she—Bob being a he—believes that money, the budget should be allocated XYZ. But in my life as a worker, I have an obligation to, as we said before, I can’t get something for free. I’m part of this group. I’m getting a benefit. Now, if he felt really strongly about this, maybe then he should resign his job. Now, I’m not suggesting he do that or take that extreme position. But if you are in a world, a sphere where you’re getting something for this, I’m just—my point is, and I think people have a legitimate right to disagree about this, you have to pay for that service. That’s all. And if you take that out of the realm of this debate about ideology, how money should be spent in the state, that should make sense to people.
Bob Zadek: But the problem is you say Mark Janus—and we’re using him as a surrogate, as a placeholder for all public service workers paying agency fees, I have no idea what he believes—but Mark Janus, let’s take—let’s digress for a moment to Obamacare or to health insurance, just to borrow a concept. Under health—under the Obamacare plan, and I’m oversimplifying to make a point, I am compelled—I would be compelled if I bought certain plans to buy coverage for maternity or coverage for other illnesses that there’s no way on earth I’m going to get. Now, for one hand, I’m buying something and therefore getting a benefit. On the other hand, the benefit is illusory to me. I don’t want it. I reject the benefit. I’d rather have the money. So Janus would say what you’re describing as a benefit, that is higher wages to Janus, it’s a detriment. That’s not even a benefit. So the concept of free rider is kind of—has a bit of an asterisk to it because Janus might not consider it to be a benefit to get higher wages that he’s in effect—he’s paying the union to get him higher wages which he doesn’t even want and he considers to be a detriment. And that’s kind of the free—I think that’s the free rider concept, both sides of it. But your thoughts.
Jonathan Tasini: What I always have to chuckle about is because I doubt that any of these people who say, “Hey, I don’t want to pay union fees,” actually then say, “I don’t want to get the wages and benefits that come with that.” Finding a single person that says that, “You know what, I’m turning back all those wages and all those new health benefits that I’m getting as part of collective bargaining agreement because I’m not paying those agency fees.” I think the larger question that you’re starting to touch on, and maybe we want to talk about it in terms of Janus, is, you know, in society we pay for things because we’re part of a larger community. Not everybody gets to say—you don’t get a—an income tax form, for example, that has a little—a whole series of boxes where you check off things you want to pay for and things you don’t want to pay for. I’ll give an example, my own example. I think we spend an obscene amount on the Defense Department and on military spending, which has huge political effects. It affects who gets elected and how they run for—how they run for office. But I don’t get to send my tax form in and say, “You know what, this is against my free speech rights because I really oppose military spending and so forth.” I don’t get to do that. I have to pay for those things. Separately, I get to support, for example, someone like Bernie Sanders and try to get him elected president because I think he will be better in certain areas. So in a certain way, yes, as part of—we don’t live in this—in a world of no laws and everybody gets to say and do as they please because then you’d have no red lights, you’d have accidents in intersections, we’d have chaos. So there’s certain things that living in an organized society, a decent society, there’s a give and take in that. And some of that means that some things happen that we don’t want.
Unions and the Middle Class [21:02]
Bob Zadek: Now, the Janus case is feared—no one knows exactly what the effect will be on Janus—of the Janus decision on worker life in America. We have to wait and see. The unions and legislators are working very hard to find statutory workarounds. They’ve just begun. Many people believe the effects can be diminished. That doesn’t make me happy, maybe it makes you happy. We’re not discussing happiness on the show. But there will be lots of workarounds. There will be lots of attempted workarounds. Some will fail, some will succeed, some will be silly, some will be found to be unconstitutional. But there’ll be workarounds.
But the core question is, we haven’t—public service unions are relatively new phenomenon in America. And of course, as we all know, Franklin Roosevelt was opposed to workers, to unions representing government workers. So they’ve had a—their history is kind of recent and their power is kind of recent. And I wonder if you would share with us, because there’s no one better than you to share this view. I start from the position that I kind of wish we didn’t even have public service workers’ unions, such as the teachers and AFSCME and SEIU. I don’t see any collective benefit. And I look at the federal government where it’s sort of grudgingly, maybe that’s okay, where the unions representing the federal government represent workers but cannot negotiate wages on their behalf and of course cannot strike, obviously. So tell us, if you will, what I’m missing about what public good—putting aside the private good of getting higher wages for the workers—but you and many other people passionately argue for the collective, the public benefit beyond the workers themselves of having public service workers. Help us understand how this is a better country with active and powerful public employee unions.
Jonathan Tasini: So, excellent question. Now, I start with the presumption, the belief that every single person should have a union. And it simply—it comes from two things. I’ll start with the belief’s importance, perhaps, is collective bargaining has—it injects some sort of certainty in the workplace for both the private sector and the public sector, meaning the supervisors, the bosses, however you want to describe the employers, know what’s expected of them and how to behave in the workplace. And you may remember that a lot of what collective bargaining in the way that it’s institutionalized happened in the 20th century to try to, in some way, tamp down the wildcat strikes that—you know, we don’t experience this now, but there were millions of people out on the streets in the ’20s and ’30s, largely because of the Great Depression, because poverty was so systemic then. Collective bargaining was put in place to try to have some sort of labor peace, meaning so that both sides would know what was required of them, both workers and management.
But here’s the second thing, and this is always astonishing to me, and I sometimes debate Stephen Moore, who’s a, you know, very conservative economist, and I debate him on CNN. Stephen Moore makes the case—he’s quite anti-union—but at the same time he says one of the problems we have in the economy is low wages. And I always say to Stephen, “Well, Stephen, these two things are intimately related.” If you took a graph—and I’m going to try to describe this for your listeners—if you took a graph and you looked at the decline of unionization over the last 30 or 40 years, it almost exactly mirrors the increase in inequality and the decline in wages. It is just a fact that unions have basically built the middle class. That even, I think, most conservatives would agree that union wages are much higher. They may not like unions because it takes away some power from companies and employers. But if we want a middle class, whether you’re public sector or private sector, there is no other way. It is just a fact that individuals can’t go out and bargain for themselves and get a decent wage. And the reason you see people still worried—we have this low unemployment right now, but why is it that wages are still flat? The fact is, it’s because we don’t have unions in America. And if you look around the world at the prosperous countries, certainly in Western Europe, they have a very high rate of unionization. Now, they also have all sorts of social protections built in. In most countries, as you know, people get healthcare, pensions are part of the way people live. In this country, we have this bare-bones where people don’t have real healthcare, they don’t have real pensions anymore. And on top of that, they don’t have wages, I would argue, the decent wages to pay their bills. I would argue it’s because of the decline in unionization.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, and I’m speaking with Jonathan Tasini. We are discussing the Janus case in particular and unions in general. Jonathan is the publisher and editor of Working Life. He does a wonderful podcast. Jonathan will tell you about it when we come back from break. We are discussing—we are about to discuss whether or not unions created and supported the middle class in America. We’ll be back in 60 incredibly short seconds when you will learn that I am not so in agreement that unions contributed to the middle class, and if they did, it was an artificial contribution. Jonathan, you’ll have to wait 60 seconds for my rebuttal. I’ll be right back. Please stay tuned.
[Sponsor Break]
The “Free Market” and CEO Pay [28:21]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. I’m joined this morning with my new best friend, Jonathan Tasini. Jonathan is the publisher and editor of Working Life. He is a strong supporter of the union movement, both in the public and in the private sector. And we are discussing in general the recent case of Janus v. AFSCME, when the Supreme Court took a hit, if you will—whether the hit is short-term or long-term history or the future will tell us.
Before we went to break, Jonathan, in support of the union movement in general, offered the point of view that unions were strong contributors to the middle class and the growth of the middle class in America, which growth by some statistics is now starting—the growth has flattened out quite a bit, if not diminished. And I guess Jonathan would say that is directly related to the decline in union membership in America. Now, Jonathan, my response—I hope I was fair in describing what you said before break—but my response is, I agree that unions were important, were an important factor, if not the most important factor, in the growth of the middle class in America. But here is my libertarian or libertarian-ish response.
It is no—there are lots of circumstances when goods and services and products are bought and sold at a price of more than they are worth. And by worth, I mean what a free market—the price a free market would dictate. So it’s no big deal to simply, like a minimum wage, legislate that people must buy and sell goods or services at something more than the market value of their services. So I agree with what you said. And my—one of my beefs when I discuss unions, one of my beefs is that one of the main purposes, maybe the most important purpose, but we can discuss that, one of the purposes of unions is to see to it that their membership gets paid more than they are worth. And by worth, I mean more than the market would dictate the services are worth. And I would say that’s a minus, not a plus.
Jonathan Tasini: Okay. First of all, it’s great to be one of your new best friends. I need all the new best friends I can muster and circle around, so I’m glad to be in that category. And yes, you represented fairly in introducing my position. Now, the way I would respond to this, to your point, is a few things. First of all, there is no such thing as a free market. I don’t think it ever existed, but there is no such thing as a free market today. If you look at all the ways both the tax system, in the way it benefits certain companies over others, in the way, for example, CEO salaries are negotiated, there is no such thing as a free market. You just go down a list. I think that the free market is just a marketing phrase that’s used to accomplish ideological goals, mainly to enrich a few over the vast majority of people. I think there’s no debate that today we have the most unequal country we’ve had in probably the last 50 years. And I think that’s partly because this notion of the quote-unquote “free market” has been everything we worship, mostly perhaps the elites worship, and it’s really impoverished people.
But here’s the—here’s a very specific example where I think that we underestimate the willingness of individuals to pay more for service. I looked—I took part in some focus groups, meaning from behind the window I was watching people answer questions around Walmart. And as you well know, you’re an expert in this, Walmart is the biggest employer in the United States. And people were asked—and I’ll say one other thing, everybody knows that Walmart’s big selling point, if you will, is that it offers low prices to people, right? And it does not have a union. It’s very happy not to have a union. People were asked in this focus group, “If you knew that Walmart had to raise its prices because it, number one, had to guarantee people healthcare, meaning its workers, and pay higher wages, would you be willing to pay the nickel or ten cents more on a product?” And virtually everyone in that room said yes. Now, the caveat to that is Walmart benefits also from the poverty of people, meaning overwhelmingly people who shop there are so poor or are so stressed in terms of their finances, they have no option. They have to shop at Walmart. So going back to my point about the middle class, if we want to have a middle class, we have to raise wages. And I believe that if people have higher wages, they will be willing to pay—let’s move away from Walmart—the extra nickel for a Big Mac or ten cents or whatever it is at the restaurant because food is one of the biggest things people purchase. So I think these things are definitely tied together. I don’t think it’s the labor movement’s fault, if I can use that word. I think it’s the way we have a system that does not really reward hard work and shovels too much wealth to a few people.
Bob Zadek: Let me—I have a free marketeer response to that anecdote you shared with us about the focus group. They were asked, if I may, the wrong question. Not “Would you be willing to pay ten cents more for a whatever if it was going to worker healthcare?” Well, that’s not the right question. The question would be, if there were two Walmart stores, one which charged ten cents more and offered worker better benefits, and one which charged a modest amount less and didn’t offer those benefits, which Walmart would you patronize? Now, that’s the free market. That means some people would say, like they buy local, locally produced farm products, “I will willingly pay more. I have a choice. I have a free market. I am given an option and I choose to have non-genetically modified food or genetically modified food. I have a choice.” But in your example, the question was kind of silly, designed by the focus group, because “Would you pay ten cents more?” Well, you didn’t give the focus group participants a choice. If Walmart all raised their prices, what choice do you have? If Walmart is still the cheapest, you have no choice. You might be grumpy, but you’re going to pay ten cents more because you have no choice. So I don’t quite understand exactly what the proof is of that focus group.
Jonathan Tasini: Well, I think what I was trying to say, and I think that posing one Walmart against another Walmart, maybe you have to pose Walmart against Joe’s store or something, some other competitor.
Bob Zadek: Or Target.
Jonathan Tasini: Or Target, for example. So you have to—I see what you’re saying. And there’s no question that there would be some people who would say, “I would rather pay ten cents less.” But I think the point I was trying to make in this focus group, this is a larger, if you will, national question, is do we benefit from as a society from essentially a low-cost world, which is what this free market notion says? Like, okay, you have two competitors or three competitors, and people will want, usually, if human nature is a barometer, to get the lowest price. And my point is that I think, and it touches on everything we talked about, is that a society that’s sustainable? That essentially we end up—and this goes back to our leadership and what we advocate for—we end up with a society where people can’t afford to pay their bills. And then you get the holistic things: you get homelessness, you get a whole list of things of bankruptcies, people having to have two or three jobs, that goes to the social issues, people don’t have time to spend with their kids. It’s a whole raft of things that comes to the point, really, how do we divide our wealth? And how do we share the wealth of the wealthiest country in human history? How do we share that? And in my view, it’s not by the lowest cost, and it’s not by giving CEOs tens of millions of dollars and giving workers very little. And in my view, the only way, at least in the marketplace, to even that out is to have strong unions.
CEO Salaries and Corporate Governance [38:17]
Bob Zadek: Now, you mentioned twice—I’ve been counting with drawing strokes on a paper—you mentioned CEO’s salaries. Now, I’m going to join forces with you, and I’m going to tell you, on another show, I would love to talk about corporate governance. Because I believe corporate governance in America is as sick as sick can be. And I believe that there is something profoundly wrong with how we compensate senior management. Shareholders really don’t get to vote. I find it to be an embarrassment. I hate it. And just to digress, because now you got me going, Jonathan, I look at any CEO in America, any CEO in America, being fed tons and tons and tons of data, being delegating lots of research to committees and then making decisions. I dare say that among my circle of friends, almost anybody, other than visionaries like Gates or Jeff Bezos—there are, or Steve Jobs—there are many visionaries. But there are many people who are just empty suits who have gotten to the top and they are paid infinitely more than they are worth. So Jonathan, if you want to talk about CEO salary and senior management salaries, I’m in the program. Where do I sign? Who do I send my check to? But that is kind of separate and apart, I think, because that’s a structural issue in dealing with governance and not dealing with free market issues. That’s dealing with governance, how we allow corporations to run.
Jonathan Tasini: Okay. Well, and I totally agree with what you just said about CEOs. And I would say they’re not separate because those same people who get to be CEOs, and they do so because—I’ll add on to what you said—they basically appoint their friends to the boards of directors, who then give them tens of millions of dollars. Not just the pay is not where the real gold is, it’s in retirement and other benefits that they—their pension benefits are just astronomical. But when you appoint that small group of people, the way we’ve developed this, if you will, this elite circle of CEOs, they’re the ones that pervert the marketplace. And so what I said before, that there is no such thing as a free market, that’s partly connected to the fact that we have a system of governance in companies that influences that. So I don’t think we can say they’re separate.
Teacher Salaries and Public Services [40:56]
Bob Zadek: Now, getting—so that’s another show, and maybe I’ll give you an open invitation, we can talk about corporate governance because it’s a whole other topic independent of the union topic we’re trying to cover in this hour. Now, I have another—a direct question for you that I’ve been looking forward to asking. Teachers, which are a big segment of the public employee just in headcount and in value of their services and in political activity, teachers’ unions—and there’s of course more than one—are very active and very vocal and very visual because they deal with kids and everybody loves teachers, or supposed to love teachers, and that’s appropriate. But my question is, teachers complain—and here is the word that stumps me, Jonathan, and I’m going to ask you for help—teachers complain that they are grossly underpaid as compared to something else.
It’s the concept of underpaid, and therefore they need unions to be not underpaid. I don’t get underpaid. If they are not being paid the market value of their services, the issue is not unions. That’s purely political. Take any county in America, and that county makes a decision: Does money go to kids, or go to firemen, or go to roads, or go to nobody? And if the residents of that community are not happy with the allocation of resources, they will vote the bums out and put in people who will build better school systems. And the allocation of money between schools and other needs is done in the political process. So teachers—and if a teacher is not offered enough salary in a school district, don’t take the job. And if the salary of teachers is not sufficient for you, a budding teacher who’s taking an education degree, don’t be a teacher. And if you become a teacher, then you do so with your eyes open. So it’s the concept of being underpaid as an economic concept that I don’t understand.
Jonathan Tasini: So, one general point. I do think that any group of people, whether it be teachers or other group of activists, and—or people, citizens, they need leadership. And I think sometimes because of the way some people look at the word “union,” that is a red flag. But any grouping of people, it’s not spontaneous where people just start doing things automatically and therefore results in a result. Donald Trump got elected, to use an example that makes my stomach turn, because there were lots of people who organized that campaign. There were people who put the ads on TV. It’s either the way the organized movement—things don’t happen spontaneously. So that’s why teachers need a union to stand up for them.
To your point about underpaid, I just did a series over the last several months about the teacher uprisings in basically conservative states: West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina. All of those happened because teachers were underpaid. Some of them I spoke to—I spoke to one teacher who wasn’t a Democrat, she had to go to a food bank, to a food pantry. Again, I want to say this: a teacher in the United States of America could not earn enough money to make the end of the month to feed her family. That to me is an outrage and an obscenity that teachers, the people who are trying to mold the minds and educate our future generations, can’t make enough money to feed their families.
Now, the interesting thing about these uprisings generally—I just wrote a piece that was posted a few days ago—that what they were entirely—step back. Sometimes there’s, as you well know as an expert in this area in politics, there’s conflict between the state citizens, parents versus teachers. In virtually every single case in these uprisings, the teachers, the parents of these kids, stood with the teachers and said, “We have gone too far. We have to pay our teachers decently because the kids are going to schools where lots of teacher positions are left open because teachers are leaving the profession because they can’t afford to make a living.” And in addition to not only the parents, you had school superintendents, the people who run the damn schools, standing with the teachers. And the thing, just to end with a positive note that I see coming out of this, I think finally we are starting to see—and this is what I think the teacher uprisings because they’re teachers—we’re starting to see the result of a foolish notion of basically lower taxes as if you could have the services with lower taxes. It’s false. And we have to pay—we have to pay for what we want. And if you want decent schools—and you go down the list of other services—people are now starting to realize. And I think it’s very important that this happened in so-called red states, conservative states. People, regular people are saying, “Wait a minute, something’s broken here.”
Productivity and the Future of Labor [46:42]
Bob Zadek: You’re exactly—you know, you’re exactly right, Jonathan. And—well, there it is, I said it. You’re exactly right. The interesting—my spin on—or my—what I do—how I process what you just said is, sure, in many low-tax states and municipalities—or take Kansas where Brownback misjudged the—his constituency and he took a hit at the polls and he took a hit at the ballot box. That is—and you mentioned active parents complaining. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. Just like saying, “These roads suck, and if you don’t fix the roads, I’m not going to vote for you.” Well, “These schools suck. If you don’t fix the schools, I’m not voting for you.” That’s how it’s supposed to work. And each community will make a decision. And if communities make the wrong decision, people leave, no one wants to work there, the community declines, and people vote with their feet, a concept that I warmly, warmly embrace. I love voting with your feet. So the point is, in both of—in what we both said, the wages will go up because the taxpayers demand it, because they demand good schools. But that’s not a union function. That’s the way it’s—in my view, the way it’s supposed to work. Taxpayers say, “We want good schools or out of here, and you’re out of here in terms of an elected official.”
Jonathan Tasini: Well, sure it’s a union function, but here’s why. And specifically, this is what I’m proud of when I—when I am a union member, I’ve always been proud of unions. Unions represent people in the community. The fact that you’re—that you sit in a building that is not going to poison you is a result of unions. The fact that we are talking today on a weekend, on a Sunday, the labor movement brought people the weekend. And you go down the list of the things—and it’s not just unions, there are other community movements and people who did these things and politicians like FDR and people who saw a need for a social compact, if you will. That’s what unions bring. It’s not just—I think looking at it just, “Oh, they’re only giving wages and benefits to their members,” there’s something broader to that because those people then who get those wages and benefits, they go out and spend them at the local store, or they go out and they’re able to pay their bills. That helps—it’s an economic benefit to have unions. That’s my point, not an economic detriment.
Bob Zadek: And in terms of—and we’re running out of time, but I want to give you some time to help the audience learn how to follow your writings. But what may be the last concept we can talk about is the concept of lower wages, wages not accelerating fast enough. I say, who invented the concept that wages must go up? Wages will go up if the value of an hour of a worker’s time is more than it was yesterday. It is everybody’s job to offer to sell something that’s at a price they’re willing to accept. So it’s—you can’t legislate increased value. And by the way, Jonathan, we have about a minute left. Go ahead, Jonathan.
Jonathan Tasini: Right about that. Work productivity has increased dramatically over 30, 40 years. The minimum wage today, if people got what you just said, the value of that, should be $20 an hour. Essentially, people work hard and the value of their work is being taken from them in the form of corporate profits and CEO pay. People can follow me at @jonathantasini—@jonathantasini is my Twitter. And as you pointed out, I have a podcast at workinglife.org and people can sign up for free at the—for the podcast.
Bob Zadek: And what is the Working Life? What is the premise? What is the driving philosophy of your podcast?
Jonathan Tasini: This is a blog I started when blogs first started, I think in 2004 is the first time I started writing it. And I’ve added a podcast to it recently. It’s basically about work, the economy, and politics. And it’s certainly—it’s written from a progressive, pro-union, if you want to say, I’m proud to say, democratic socialist view.
Bob Zadek: Jonathan, thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time this Sunday morning. I’m giving you an open invitation. Join me again, we’ll bash CEOs for a whole hour. Thanks so much, Jonathan. Thanks to my friends out there. I’ll be back next Sunday for another hour of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening. Have a nice Sunday.